Shoes and Sugar

I had a free day yesterday! Woo hoo! After laying around my apartment in the morning, I headed out to do some errands. This coming week at school, we teachers are each offering a prize for bringing in food for the food bank. I will post more about it as the contest commences. My prize came from the mall.

I also needed new shoes. One of my old shoes squeaked. It was loud enough that it distracted the kids when it was quiet in the room and I was walking around. One of my students said I should go to Sports Authority. There was a good selection. I almost bought a super-colorful shoe. One of my students has this same shoe, but in women’s, because she’s a girl.

It was a little too flashy. And the price was too high. Instead, I got a nice Asics shoe on sale:

I was tired after all that shopping, so I headed home. But on the way home, I decided to stop at the sugar factory. I pass by it every day. I thought I should visit the Sugar Museum and find out about all this sugarcane I see.

I found out what I wanted: how sugar is extracted from cane. What you do is smash it and crush it until the juice comes out, then heat the juice to thicken it. Then heat it some more and spin it in a giant centrifuge. Out come raw sugar crystals. The remaining juice is called molasses. Both are sent across the ocean for final refining. But some raw sugar is kept here for locals and tourists. I got a free little bag of it on my way out. Cool!
The new software to my website does not write captions in such a way that I can see them in Google Chrome, but I think the caption for the above picture is funny, so I will also print it here: “The first bag is free.”

PS I haven’t seen any comments on your pictures for awhile now. And when I click underlined words, I get something that I don’t get. Have there been picture captions? Do the underline words go to something unrelated???? Is it me or my computer???

Suggested re-title for today’s post: “Why doesn’t ANYone apparently see my captions any more?!” Nah, me neither – ‘cept for one day a few days ago, so I figured it must have been something on my end of cyberspace until that day…but now not again….so…??

Anywhom, thank you for answering the $64K question about how sugar comes from the cane and where molasses really comes from (here all these years I thought it was from the derrieres of subterranean eutherian mammals…silly me!)